Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Set in October 1943, Clandestine, by J. Robert Janes (Mysterious Press/Open Road), dispatches the unlikely investigative duo of Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the French Sûreté and Detektiv Inspektor Hermann Kohler of the Nazi Gestapo to a crumbling, ancient Cistercian abbey in northern France, where a bank delivery van has been hijacked. The vehicle’s two male occupants are found shot some distance away, while the stacks of cash and black-market foodstuffs that were being transported have been ransacked--but only a suspiciously small quantity of each is missing. Equally bewildering is the discovery of a
woman’s high-heeled shoes on the scene. Who was their wearer, why was she in the van, and where has she gone? An excellent entry in Janes’ long-running series, taking place at a time when the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s war forces appears inevitable. Believe No One, by A.D. Garrett (Minotaur)--the sequel to Everyone Lies (2014)--finds British Detective Chief Inspector Kate Simms on sabbatical in St. Louis, Missouri, where she’s to share knowledge with the local cops and enjoy some necessary distance from Scottish forensics authority Nick Fennimore. But Fennimore, on a concurrent U.S. speaking tour, winds up rejoining Simms to pursue a serial slayer who has been murdering young mothers along the Midwest’s Interstate 44, and abducting their children. For Fennimore this case has a personal connection: his wife was killed five years ago in a similarly grisly fashion, and his daughter taken.

Just the Facts

All Points Bulletin

Send Us News:
The Rap Sheet is always on the lookout for information about new and soon-forthcoming books, special author projects, and distinctive crime-fiction-related Web sites. Shoot us an e-mail note here.

Subscribe to The Rap Sheet

If You Can, Please Help The Rap Sheet to Survive and Thrive

Spring Reading Picks

Check out our selection of more than 350 works of mystery, crime, and thriller fiction—from both sides of the Atlantic—scheduled to reach bookstores between now and the beginning of June. Click here.

Your Vigilance Is Welcome

Those of us responsible for The Rap Sheet try to get everything right, and we work to keep our Web links up to date. But we’re not perfect. So, if you spot any errors (typographical or otherwise) in this blog, or discover links or embedded videos that aren’t functioning properly, please let us know via e-mail.

The Rap Sheet Faithful

Disclosure Notice

The Rap Sheet accepts books sent free of charge from publishers, publicists, and authors. Those works may inspire comments on this page. However, in no case is there any promise given that a book will be the subject of an endorsement or review, either positive or negative.

Videos Disclaimer

From time to time, The Rap Sheet features short video clips. Use of these is for historical and entertainment purposes only, and is not meant to establish ownership of such materials. Rights to those clips stay with their owners/creators.

The One Book Project

In honor of The Rap Sheet’s first birthday, we invited more than 100 crime writers, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been “most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years.” Their choices can be found here.

The Wayback Machine

Before The Rap Sheet was a blog, it was a monthly newsletter in January Magazine. To find all the old editions of that newsletter, just click here.

Buy Books Online

QUOTABLE CRIME

“Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it’s a letdown, they won’t buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.” — American crime novelist Mickey Spillane